News
2010 News & Highlights
- Summer 2010: Experiments with our latest software show better message logging
(512 proc job had 73% reduction in message log volume). We have developed
a new synchronized clock scheme which exhibits much better performance than
previous distributed protocols. An initial design of our spidercast communications
service will be released this Summer. We have developed a new DHT (distributed
has table) service (see Tock10b). Our performance results for topology aware load
balancing proven with OpenAtom.
- January 2010: More Great News! The Colony Project was selected to receive
a supercomputing allocation through the Innovative and Novel Computational
Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program. The INCITE program
promotes cutting-edge research that can only be conducted with state-of-the-art
supercomputers. The Leadership Computing Facilities (LCFs) at Argonne and
Oak Ridge national laboratories, supported by the U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Science, operate the program. The LCFs award sizeable allocations
on powerful supercomputers to researchers from academia, government, and
industry addressing grand challenges in science and engineering such as
developing new energy solutions and gaining a better understanding of climate
change resulting from energy use. The DOE has released a press release
here.
2009 Highlights
- November 2009: There will be a Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) meeting for FastOS
projects during the annual Supercomputing Conference in Portland Oregon.
The BOF, which will be held Wednesday Nov-18-2009 at 5:30, will include
brief presentations from many of the projects funded by the FastOS program
(see this
link for more details).
- September 2009: Colony II is officially underway! The three research teams
(ORNL, UIUC, and IBM) have received their funding and we are
now able to start the next phase of our research. (Funding was delayed to
accomodate our PI, Terry Jones, who is joining ORNL.) Colony II will be
funded for three years to study adaptive system software approaches to
issues associated with load imbalances, faults, and extreme scale systems.
2008 Highlights
- Our Project Principal Investigator, Terry Jones, will be joining Oak Ridge
National Laboratory as a Staff R&D Member in the Computer Science
and Mathematics organization. In the last few years, Oak Ridge has
dramatically increased their supercomputing facilities. Among the
production systems at ORNL is a 4096 core Blue
Gene/P machine and a 250 Tflop Cray and much larger machines are
currently being installed. Terry will be working with a team of
system software researchers who have brought about such innovations
as Parallel Virtual Machine and HPC OSCAR.
- Great News! Colony has been selected by the DOE Office of Science to receive funding for three additional
years! Over that timespan, we will focus on furthering our strategies and obtaining results with
key scientific applications.
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March, 2008: The Office of Advanced Scientific Computing's Computer Science program
recently announced that they are awarding new funds to the Colony Project to continue their
collaborative work on improving high performance computing (HPC) system software stacks.
Today's system software stacks, including operating systems and runtime systems,
unnecessarily limit performance or portability (or in some cases, both). Strategies
developed by the Colony Project address a wide range of system software problems such
as operating system interference (noise) while introducing important adaptive
capabilities that free workloads from performance-reducing load imbalances.
Colony Project is a collaborative effort that includes the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center,
and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Colony began its research effort
in 2005 and has received its major funding through the DOE Office of Science Advanced
Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) program (ASCR link
here, ASCR's computer
science projects link here).
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- The Colony project received computer time as part of the
2008 BGW Day
. We performed a number of experiments to evaluate our latest coordinated scheduling
kernel (including parameter space studies). A report describing our tests and results is
available here.
2007 Highlights
- Scaling results from July-26-2007 experiments conducted by the Colony team on their big-pages kernel at the Sixth
BGW Day are now available in this report. Additional results in
the areas of Resource management and fault tolerance are also
available from experiments we conducted during the Fourth BGW Day. These experiments were performed on a
20,000+ core system at IBM's T. J. Watson facility.
- Compute node Linux demonstrated running NAS parallel benchmark, Charm++ application, and other programs.
- We assessed operating system evolution on the basis of several key factors related to system call functionality.
These results were the basis for a paper presenting the system call usage trends for Linux and Linux-like
lightweight kernels. Comparisons are made with several other operating systems employed in high performance
computing environments including AIX, HP-UX, OpenSolaris, and FreeBSD.
- We completed and demonstrated a prototype of our fault tolerance scheme based on message-logging [Chakravorty07],
showing that the distribution of objects residing on a failing processor can significantly improve the recovery
time after the failure.
- Our proactive fault-tolerance scheme was integrated to the regular Charm++ distribution and is now available for
any Charm++/AMPI user.
- We extended the set of load balancers available in Charm++, by integrating the recently developed balancers
based on machine topology. These balancers use metrics based on volume of communication and number of hops
as factors in their balancing decisions
2006 Highlights
- First prototype Linux solution for Blue Gene compute nodes is operational.
- We completed a detailed study of the difference in performance observed when running the same application
using either Linux or the lightweight Compute Node Kernel (CNK) on the Blue Gene compute nodes.
Included in the assessment was a study on the impact of this noise on the performance of Blue Gene.
- We assessed the effectiveness of our in-memory checkpointing by performing tests on a large BlueGene/L
machine. In these tests, we used a 7-point stencil with 3-D domain decomposition, written in MPI.
Our results are quite promising to 20,480 processors.
- Our proactive fault tolerance scheme is based on the hypothesis that, some faults can be predicted.
We leverage the migration capabilities of Charm++, to evacuate objects from a processor where faults
are imminent. We assessed the performance penalty due to incurred overheads as well as memory footprint
penalties for up to 20,480 processors.
- To accomplish our goal for Global Resource Management, we have developed a new hybrid load balancing
algorithm (HybridLB) that is designed for scientific applications with persistent computation and
communication patterns. HybridLB utilizes a load balancing hierarchical tree to distribute tasks
across processors. We demonstrated this approach can effectively deal with certain problems encountered
by centralized approaches (e.g. contention and unsatisfactory memory footprint).
2005 Highlights
- We studied the behavior of one particular source of asynchronous events: the TLB misses incurred
by dynamic memory management (which are absent in the production CNK). We modified CNK to support
dynamic memory management with a parameterized page size and analyzed the impact of different
strategies/page sizes on NAS kernels and Linpack.
- We measured the effectiveness of parallel-aware scheduling for mitigating operating system
interference (also referred to as OS noise and OS jitter in recent literature). Preliminary results
on the Miranda parallel instability code indicate that parallel aware scheduling across the
machine can dramatically reduce variability in runtimes (standard deviation decreased from
108.45 seconds to 5.45 seconds) and total wallclock runtime (mean decreased from 452.52 seconds
to 254.45 seconds).
- Our in-memory checkpointing scheme is designed.
- We analyzed Charm++ current resource management schemes and designed new more scalable schemes.
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